User blog:EternalDragon77/My tips on studying Japanese and some other languages. Welcome to this long lecture continued from my page!
(Continued from my profile page) No, you don't have to study Japanese everyday. Just make sure you study enough Japanese and read enough Japanese sentences that they enter your short term memory, like everything else you study. After resting for like a few weeks or so, go back to reading Japanese and that's how, in the long term, your knowledge on Japanese gets stored into your long term memory after being reawakened. That's how I did it. Even without like 1-2 months practice, I already got used to reading Japanese after having read TDA 01 and translating the first battle for like 40+ hours. It slowly sinks into your head, and you really should study Japanese while you're young. Those 40 hours were truly intense, which is why they made like a tatoo into my brain because I was basically driving myself to the edge with it. At least, let your brain rest from Japanese for a while, but not too long, that your brain will feel comfortable rather than stressed. Eventually, when you encounter more Japanese media, your brain will want to study Japanese more, and that's how you are able to enjoy reading Japanese rather than for it to be a chore. At least, that's the study method I used, though my vocabulary and kanji lists in my head are crap. I didn't study that much, and Rikaichan will help you with that. A free app that you can get for Firefox. Of course, don't get Rikaikun for Chrome since that doesn't work all the time. Basically, what I'm trying to say is that, when you're studying a language, find things you enjoy about it and make sure you enjoy it a lot. Don't make it turn into a chore. Well, to be honest, I wasn't born with the rare gene that makes you like studying a lot. At least, I really do wish I was born with that. So, get used to Japanese over time in your head before you attempt to drive yourself crazy with it. Study it while you're young, and after you study the grammar and memorize most of it, you can use Rikaichan to look up the words while reading, which will tell you what tense the verb is, whether it's passive, etc. that probably other dictionaries don't tell you about. So yeah, the most important step to take is to study the grammar first. Without grammar, your insertion of Japanese into your head will be extremely hard, and it won't really be fun. And when it comes to the Visual Novel Reader, don't use the dictionary in it. Just copy+paste the text into the web browser and use Rikaichan. The Visual Novel Reader doesn't tell you the tenses, and you can't really make more than one combination of kanjis so that you get more than one potential word. The Visual Novel Reader is just not perfect. And what I really hate about translating Hibiki's thoughts is his slang that he uses all the time. Like, he would have one word from his inner monologue that would have a missing vowel/consonant. So, yeah, you have to figure it out for yourself, which makes it problamatic in translation, which is very hard from my experience. I just hate slang in Japanese that much, and you have to guess what it's pronunciation is. So, if you read that text, then that means that you took the time to read text from somebody like me who claims to be an expert on the language. Also, I REALLY want to translate the Total Eclipse visual novel if it ever comes to PC, which it might never will, but I want to do it for the sake of a fanfic though. I like fanfics of Muv-Luv, but only that though. Well, that's my cup of tea. Wonder if you were bored with that. I actually hated learning Japanese in the first place, and was too stubborn to study it at lots of times until I finally got used to processing it in my head. Definintely takes more than a year sometimes like that if you study on and off like I do. Well, the patience is worth it, so you should take a shot at it too and help me translate Muv-Luv TDA. I don't use machine translations, ever. They are truly unreliable unless if you can choose your own online machine translator, like in Visual Novel Reader, which I highly recommend using for reading visual novels, but it still doesn't work with every one of them though. Well, sorry for the long rush. I'm new here. Shiterei shimasu! Ore no TRANSLATION... Onegai yonde kudasai when the time comes. Until then, if you stumble upon this page, you can message me if you want me to post more of my translation. Still, I wonder how many lines 30 sentences per day is. Must be a tiny bit more than 30 though... though it's rather slow. As much as I'd like to translate TDA, I don't really want to translate all of it since it takes too much time, which may be a reason as to why that guy is only doing summaries on it. I haven't read those yet, but I won't since I can read Japanese. Anyway, after you get used to Japanese either a little more or a lot, you should attempt immersion. Basically, read Japanese everyday, immerse yourself in it pretty much. It really helps if you don't try to focus on remembering the words you read and just semi skim through them while enjoying reading their meanings at the same time. You'll encounter the words again in different sentences anyway, so you remember them better if you're more relaxed. That's how it works for me, at least. Also, I used Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese Grammar for studying. I recommend it if you want it straight up, but really, it's pretty hard to understand without knowing the basic hiragana and katakana since that alphabet shows up a lot in there. And I didn't know not to post this in the talk part of my profile page. This belongs to a blog, and this is a continuation from my lecture in my profile, as I said in parentheses. Update: Last night, I had realized I was memorizing the Japanese words the wrong way, and this would apply moreso to Chinese because of the extended meanings in its characters. You use... radicals to make up phrases (at least two radicals used, even if they're the same) from each of the kanjis in the word. I was able to memorize the meanings of each word I encountered in my anki deck in just one try... So, here's the trick... 退く (doku) has two radicals in it, right? The bottom one means "walking" or something like that, and the above one means "good" I think. Well, the meanings don't really matter so long as you can make sense of each radical into a sentence. Anyway, the meaning of the word is "retreat", so you memorize this phrase and make it up yourself "Walking away is a good retreat." See how I used "Good" and "Walking" radicals? That's the trick there. You CAN do more than one meaning word in the sentence, but I recommend only one word at a time if you want to make it easier on yourself. This way, whenever you're in a bind in a test or something, look at the radicals and associate them with your sentence... and viola, you get your meaning easily! Although my brother DOES say this is slow, which is true, after looking at this enough over and over, you'll eventually recognize it really quickly, so you won't have a problem with your literacy then. Even if you don't know the pronunciation then, you could always just look up the meaning, right? That's what I'm trying to say. I will go forward using this trick to ease my head into this. So yeah, learning radicals may be a pain, but it certainly is a lot better than using your head too much for kanji parts of the word where you don't use the radical trick. Here's another word: 偉人 (ijin) (great man). Sure, I didn't recognize it the first time I tried to type this out, so I had some confusion, but after seeing both of those "person" radicals, the one on the right and the leftmost part of the left kanji, then I recognized it as "ijin" "great man." So you see... I made a sentence from the person radical and its duplicate, yes, even its duplicate (same) because it works really simply like that. Basically, I made up this sentence "A person is a great man to another man." It was so simple. Even though I only studied this yesterday, I immediately recognize it thanks to the radicals! Also, I forgot that doku can also mean "withdraw" but I looked it up to get back to it anyway, so radicals, all in all, REALLY help you out a lot. It makes studying a lot of fun! So yeah, it's actually quite simple once you get used to it. And as to where I got this trick... it was thanks to the Anki deck called "Lazy Kanji Mod" where it used sentences and words for the kanji memorization and to be able to write it out. Use this trick, and I guarantee that even the noobs will be able to memorize kanji faster than those who do it through pure brain power without tricks or cheats! Yeah, so happy studying! -EternalDragon77 Category:Blog posts